Back to school...

I survived my first day of classes at UH Manoa yesterday (just barely). I took the 6:08am bus across the island, expecting it to take an absurd amount of time to get there, and made it to campus at 7:01am. I think I will be sleeping an extra half hour or so from now on! Both of my classes are enormous, 400 people each and mostly freshmen. So of course, the first day of class was professors trying to scare them into studying fifteen hours a day, having no social life, keeping the coffee shops in business and never drinking. Both classes seem pretty easy, which is probably a good thing since I haven't been in school for three years. The chemistry professor is this glamorous European woman with a practically incomprehensible accent who reads directly from her PowerPoint slides - which are posted on the Internet - so I have a feeling that most of the unruly, lazy, or slack students will elect not to attend. It is obvious that she knows her stuff and probably is teaching introductory level because she has to... Since we are paying for me to go back to school, I plan to force her to teach better by asking lots and lots of questions - I just don't see the point of paying good money for yet another crappy teacher who forces me to completely reteach myself.

After class, I got on the bus and tried to do the transfer downtown the way I was told to do - only to see the bus I wanted go whizzing by! So I ended up walking to the next kiosk, which wasn't that far - but I had been running around campus all day carrying books, so it was a lot - to catch the bus I took for the chemistry exam. This was definitely interesting since I still don't know my way around Honolulu, but luckily I got home in one piece - about 12 hours after I left yesterday morning. Needless to say, I was pretty beat! Luckily I have no class today and nothing to do other than prepare the house for Zeke and give Kitsune a bath (if I can wake him up long enough to do so...poor little guy has been tuckered out and snoring all morning!)

--jess